Beaten Senseless
by Grey L. Bloom
Summary: The Hufflepuff quidditch team has a small problem; they only have three players. This means try-outs... (Non-slash, no major book characters, major spoiler warning.)
1. Default Chapter

A/N: One night, while lying in my bed, I realized that about half of the Harry Potter fanfic archive is slash, and the other half is populated by Mary-Sues. I decided to go against the grain, and use someone who had been floating around in my head for some time now. Is she a Mary Sue? Is she written badly? Is she *gasp* unfit for the Harry Potter world?  
  
Please, please, PLEASE tell me. I'd really really like to know. I'm a tad nervous.  
  
(Disclaimer: The Harry Potter world doesn't below to me, yaddayaddayadda. Unfortunately, I had to make up pretty much all of the house this is based in, since it's NOT GRYFFINDOR. A few names may pop up that sound familiar, like Cedric Diggory, Professor Sprout, and *gasp* Harry Potter. Oh, and by the way? This fic contains massive spoilers for all four of the books. If you haven't read them all, do NOT read this.)  
  
  
Chapter 1 - Replacing Cedric  
  
  
  
It was the beginning of a new school year at Hogwarts, school of Witchcraft and Wizardry, home to four amazing Quidditch teams, the Forbidden Forest, Albus Dumbledore the Great, and Harry Potter, which speaks for itself.  
  
Students of the school could be found gathering in common rooms, the mess hall, dormitories to unpack, the grounds, and even, in the case of the infamous Weasley twins, in Professor McGonagalls office, recieving a hefty punishment for perpitrating crimes against the school, i.e., blowing up bathrooms, showering the Slytherin house portal with dung bombs, and scaring the House Elves half to death.  
  
Or in some cases, they gathered at desks...  
  
  
  
"Yes, thank you, I KNOW you want to be seeker, but you CAN'T. You're six feet tall! You're muscular! You're heavy! Are you SURE you don't want to be keeper? Or maybe a beater?"  
  
His name was Pihjin Mackey. He was one of the three Chasers on the Hufflepuff team, and elected captain. Pretty much the only reason he had managed to become captain was because there were only two other players on the team, and he was the most senior of all of them. Not to mention the fact that the others hadn't wanted to be captain, and had bullied him into it.  
  
And now came the problem of finding replacements for the missing players.  
  
The task had fallen to Pihjin, being the team captain, and he was currently sitting at a desk in the Hufflepuff common room, jotting down the names of willing Hufflepuffs. The list was dismal. Only a few had wanted to be Keeper, there were only a few names campaigning for the last Chaser position, and not one name was in the Beater column.  
  
The Seeker column ran three pages long.  
  
It was a well known fact in Hufflepuff house that the late Cedric Diggory had been Seeker last, and HE had beaten the Gryffindor team. Half the house was devoted to filling in his shoes, or at least inheriting the respect he had recieved for his post.  
  
The other spots on the team had been vacated in a happier way; their occupants had all graduated the year before. Many of the names on the Seeker pages had had to be crossed out, because they belonged to first years that were determined to be the youngest seekers ever. This, however, was not allowed. Harry Potter had only gotten onto the Gryffindor team because he had been flying his broomstick, against the rules, and had been seen by the head of Gryffindor House.  
  
Cheating idiots, the lot of them, in Pihjin's opinion.  
  
A shadow fell across the desk.  
  
"Nesbit, Helena," came a nervous voice from in front of him. "Nesbit's my last name, not Helena. I mean. You know. Uh..."  
  
"Right, right, whatever," Pihjin muttered, writing down the name in his looping scrawl. "And you want to be seeker. I'll get back to you. NE-"  
  
A hand slammed down on the table. Pihjin looked up over his glasses.   
  
Helena was NOT what he had expected. She was, well, TALL. And she didn't look like a girl, except for the casualties of puberty. Short, poofy brown hair shadowed her square face, out of which stared desperate brown eyes. "I don't want to be Seeker, I want to be Beater."  
  
Pihjin slowly crossed her name off of the Seeker list and put it on the Beater list. "You're the first, you know," he said.  
  
She looked astonished. "You're kidding!" she yelped. "But Beater is the best position! I've wanted to be Beater ever since I found out about Quidditch!"  
  
"Well, you're different," Pihjin shrugged. "What year are you?"  
  
Helena looked blank. "What?"  
  
"Year. YOU know. First year, second year, third year..."  
  
"Oh. Second year," she said quickly, nervously running a hand through her hair. "Sorry. I didn't know what you meant for a minute there."  
  
"Fine, fine. Come out to the Quidditch pitch at..." Pihjin checked the clock. "Oh... make it noon. Tomorrow. I won't be done with the Seeker hopefuls until then, at least."  
  
She grinned and nodded. "Right. Thank you! What are my chances, do you think?"  
  
Pihjin leaned over to look at the line behind her. One of the people waved a toy snitch hopefully at him. He let out a soft moan. "I'd say you'd get on the team if you could barely get into the air. NEXT!"  
  
"Hi, my name is Morven Sneckins, and I was BORN to be Hufflepuff Seeker."  
  
Pihjin sighed. It was going to be a very long day. 


	2. Pitching Quidditch

A/N: I've always loved Quidditch. It's one of the best parts of J.K. Rowling's world. I have to admit, the first time I found out about it, I wanted to be a Seeker. It was the most important role. You couldn't finish the game without Seekers, and they were normally the ones who won the game on top of that. About when I hit my "maturity" phase (I like to think I'm still in it) I realized that 1) being a Seeker would be fun, but most of it is sitting around looking for little glimmers on the field. 2) I like to where the action is in any game, one of the reasons I prefer football, American football, and basketball over, say, baseball. And 3) I'm... not built to be a Seeker. Heheh. Let's leave it at that, shall we? And so I want to be Beater. And Helena is me. She's being a Beater for me.  
  
That's the reason I wrote this chapter in about a day. (Not, might I stress, 24 hours. A day, as in I spent time on it over the course of one day.)  
  
  
Chapter 2 - Pitching Quidditch  
  
  
Helena opened her eyes and stared up at the canary yellow canopy over her bed for a while before sitting up slowly. She was the last one up; the only person in the room. She swung her feet reluctantly out from under the warm bedclothes and tiptoed carefully across the cold stone floor to the window nearest her bed.  
  
Mist lay heavily over the grounds, boiling up whenever someone walked through it, but closing on itself once more after they had passed. Rain hissed down, and she couldn't make out the Quidditch pitch, even this close.  
  
A perfect day.  
  
Helena skipped to her trunk and pulled out her Hogwarts uniform, taking a moment to bemoan the short skirt before pulling it on. Her robes came after that. She stretched her arms out and cursed the tailor as the fabric strained.  
  
And the time was... 11:30. Half an hour before she was supposed to be at the Quidditch Pitch.  
  
Drat.  
  
Helena ran all the way to the mess hall, grabbed some toast, and had to dash back to her dormitory for her broom, which she had forgotten. By then it was... 11:40.  
  
Hmmm.  
  
She made it to the pitch in time to watch a flying dot in the sky swoop... dip... pull up and... stop.  
  
"That was lovely, Mr. Welsh," the boy she recognized as the team captain yelled up, peering at a clipboard.   
  
"Walsh!" the spot yelled, bobbing a bit.  
  
"Isn't that what I said?" the captain yelled back, adjusting his glasses. "Now if you'd come down with the Snitch, I need the air space for Beater try-outs!"  
  
The dot zoomed downward, leaning carefully, growing larger as "Mr. Walsh" neared. He was pretty tall, actually, but slight, with longish red-brown hair and wire-framed glasses. He lit down carefully, swinging his leg over his broom and running with the momentum.  
  
He slowed as he came up to where Pihjin and Helena were standing, and grinned. "Did I do okay?" he asked, obviously asking them both. He had an Irish lilt to his voice.  
  
"I couldn't see you very well," Helena admitted slowly. "But what I did see was pretty good... sorry, what's your name?"  
  
"Trey," he replied, looking a bit embarrassed. "Don't ask."  
  
Pihjin glared. "Your name is Trey?" he grumbled. "MY name is, HELLO, PIHJIN MACKEY. And you're embarrassed about TREY?"  
  
Trey looked abashed. "Well, yes, actually," he responded.  
  
Pihjin shrugged. "Okay, no problem," he said, and turned to Helena, but leaning down to look at his sheet upon sheet of parchment. "Helena Nesbit, right? Well... here's some padding, a bat, some gloves, you have a broom? good, pull these boots over your shoes..." As he spoke he unloaded various items from a large trunk next to him, laying them on the damp grass without looking at them. Helena tried to keep up with him, picking the items up and putting them on as fast as she could.  
  
"...And you're set to go," the captain concluded, checking something off on the parchment. Helena only had one glove on and hadn't picked up the bat yet.  
  
Trey, meanwhile, hadn't left. He had stayed, staring at Helena as though he had seen a ghost. She glared up at him from the grass, struggling to pull on her left boot. "What is it? Do you need something?" she said, grunting as she pulled.  
  
"YOU'RE trying out for the Beater position?" he asked, giving her an odd look.  
  
"YES," she growled back, starting on her right boot. "What's so weird about that?"  
  
Trey shrugged. "I don't know, just seems strange." He grinned. "I'm glad I'm on your side, though."  
  
Helena gave him a relieved smile and stood, leaning over again for her shin pads. They were the last of the bulky pieces of padding, and she felt rather like a stuffed sock with it all on. "Now what do I need this for, anyway?" she asked Pihjin nervously, adjusting a strap.  
  
The boy barely glanced at her. "Our testing-Bludger isn't available, so we're having to use the real ones." He looked up at her. "You won't mind, will you?"  
  
Helena stared at him. The real ones were terrifying; she had seen people having their arms broken after just having been grazed by the vicious little things. And yet... this was what she had wanted.   
  
"I suppose not," she replied slowly. "Just give me some fair warning, please." He nodded, and Helena mounted her broom, touching the handle of her Cleansweep 7. She had bought it before she had come to school, in the hope that she would be able to use it. And now...  
  
Helena took off, pushing her feet into the ground to shoot herself into the air.  
  
It was wonderful. She hadn't felt this way since... well, since her last flying lesson, actually. Last year, before school got out and the students got on the train for home.  
  
From so high, she could see faint scars on the grass from where the maze had been last year for the TriWizard Tournament. A lump of ice formed in her stomach, and she tottered on her broom. The death of Cedric Diggory had been ignored, blocked, from the rest of the world, but the entire Hufflepuff house knew. It was a little hard to forget the fact that the best Seeker your house Quidditch team had ever had was killed by the most powerful Dark Wizard since Salazar Slytherin. It hadn't hit Helena as hard as it had some of Diggory's close friends, (in fact, the closest she had come to even MEETING him was seeing him once, in the common room), but that didn't mean that she hadn't cared.  
  
A cry came from below her, and she shook the depressing, distracting thoughts from her head.  
  
"Listen, Helen, when you say go, I'll release one, all right?" Pihjin yelled up at her from the grass.  
  
Helena adjusted her grip on both the broom and the bat. "It's Helena," she shouted back, "and I'm ready when you are!"  
  
And he opened the box.  
  
The Bludger hovered in the air over Pihjin's head for a moment, as if considering its next move. Helena felt the muscles in her back tense and quiver, and her shoulders started to hurt. She took a deep breath, and the Bludger soared toward her, dodging back and forth.  
  
'The Bludger will try to go around the Beaters, in order to avoid being obstructed in pursuit of their goal, i.e. knocking out the two most important players, the Keeper and the Seeker' her book had said. It was going to go around her. And she couldn't let it, or she wouldn't get on the team.  
  
Wouldn't get on the team. Wouldn't be a Beater. Wouldn't make it.  
  
Helena swallowed the lump in her throat and started toward the Bludger, trying as best she could to match its dodging and bobbing. She pulled her arm back, as she had countless times playing baseball with her older brother, and heaved and swung and...  
  
Connected.  
  
She only grazed it, but it spun, screaming, across the pitch, where Pihjin and another person had to dive out of the way. She resisted the urge to hoot and do a victory dance up on her broom, and concentrated instead on coming back down to the ground without killing herself, or worse, someone else.  
  
Helena touched down with a thud, scolding herself for not coming down as lightly as Walsh, and used the momentum to run towards Pihjin, who looked shaken.  
  
"Did I do all right?" she asked breathlessly, skidding to a halt in front of the captain. "Did I make the team? Did I do it?"  
  
"Well, considering you've just bloody knocked the only other bloody applicant out bloody cold," Pihjin squeaked, holding a hand to his heart, "you're at least on the bloody team until he can bloody try out and do bloody better than you."  
  
Helena stared at him, her eyes huge. "Oops," she muttered, and ran to help the other applicant, leaving Pihjin to deal with the angry Bludger. 


	3. Story put on hold

"Beaten Senseless" has been put on hold because of a resounding lack of inspiration and motivation. It may be up and running in a while, but don't hold your breath. 


End file.
